This week, for my class photography project, we were focusing on food photography and typographic design. We were charged with shooting food and then either writing the recipe or ad text to complete the image. For me, I decided to use a recipe for my favorite energy juice that I drank before I started my Sunday homework marathon.

Since practicing yoga, gyming it up more, and working towards a more balanced trinity of mind, body and spirit, I have found raw or clean eating to be key.

This was a fight scene I choreographed with the FBX plug-in for 3ds Max to render these bipeds in a very brief battle. The assignment called for using guides to mimic a fight, but since the file would not work on my computer for some reason, I created one from scratch instead.

This is a series I created where I am going to chronicle my schoolwork from start to graduation.

This way, I can see my growth and I can share that knowledge and growth with all of you.

In this one, I was tasked with simulating DOF in an image. Normally I would throw a macro lens on or another with a wide open aperture, but for this assignment, we were told to use PS to create a sense of depth.

I chose to use my Easter tulips for the job and so I could really close down the f-stop, I brought out a speedlight in a softbox to remove most of the depth of field. On the left, you will see all of my edits and on the right, you will see the image as it was out of the camera.

I made it subtle, but I think it works just fine!

This was simply done by creating a layer and masking the main foreground flower out while adding a Gaussian blur o the selection to properly feather it. Then I created a channel for this and applied a lens blur. The selection was inverted and a layer mask was used to clean up any places that I felt needed to be fixed.

For the additional edits, I adjusted the tones and levels so they had a bit more contrast.

This is a series I started just over a year ago where I am going to chronicle my schoolwork from start to graduation.

This way, I can see my growth and I can share that knowledge and growth with all of you.

For this assignment, as part of a much larger final project, in my Typography course, I was charged with creating a book cover as an alternate assignment to a book ad, which I gladly appreciated since the ad was kind of lame (no images or anything).

It has not been graded yet, and normally I don’t share the final drafts until they are graded, but +Measie Elizabeth said she would read a book with this image on the cover, so I thought I might oblige her with this instead!

I don’t do too many PSAs on this account or any others, but every now and then, I feel moved to do so.

Cyberbullying is very real, and it is probably (in this day and age) more damaging to the emotional psyche of victims to this form of abuse than getting a black eye on the school yard.

In my travels around the Social Media Sphere, I have spoken with people who have been cyberstalked and cyberbullied, and I think it should really stop.

I signed this petition and also wrote an essay (towards a scholarship) about the harmful effects this type of abuse can have on a person as I have been at the business end of a cyberbully who believed lowering my feelings of worth were a way to elevate their own.

Without amazing people in my life, and they (and you) know who you are, it may have really put me in a lower place than I was, so I urge anyone who would like to see cyberbullying deleted to sign this petition.

Nine times out of ten, I am going to post something photography or art related on social media because that is what I am known for, but today I was listening to Dan Pink talk about motivations or more specifically what motivates people.

It comes down to Autonomy, Mastery, and Contribution.

We want to work freely, become masterful at things, and then we want to share and contribute to a greater goal.

This makes complete sense if you look at most of us who use social media as a tool for learning, growing and exploring. We pick a passion – be it art, music, applied mathematics, video games, or general tech/innovations.

I have a full time job in education, but my passion and one day dream, is to be able to switch from full time in education to full time artist with a consulting gig in education. I wouldn’t even mind a healthy blend of educational innovation mixed with the creativity that goes along with artistry.

In my efforts to be able to make that huge shift, I have gone back to school…again…and it takes up a good deal of my time outside of the full time job. That being said, I had a chance, recently, to see my education work meld with my post-work art life when I began doing research on the projections for the future in education and I happened upon more reports and data on MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), which are free and turning the education world on its ear.

This started with Stanford, and now you can take courses from Harvard, MIT, Penn State and so many others by way of Coursera, edX, Udemy, and Udacity. Many of which are free and open to anyone willing/wanting to learn. There are some “pay for” classes, some that have signature tracks that cost money, but there is a huge number of courses that are free and you receive a certificate from the instructor for passing, which can be added to your resume or portfolio, and who knows, maybe one day it will be accepted by many colleges as course credit that may be transferred in and save you money towards a degree.

Of a personal interest, and one that I thought might be something that my artsy/photog friends might be interested comes from Udemy, which offers some “pay” and some free art classes:

Even if it is just for a little professional growth and development or to help you kickstart a new profession or something you are passionate about (there are even Entrepreneurial courses available), I really would encourage you to take a peek at what they all have to offer. In addition, some of these platforms allow you to create courses so you can share/contribute to the world!